Opera browser compressed over 23 petabytes of data last month and sees responsive photos as key for pages loading faster

Most of us just end up using the stock browser on our smartphones. But your choice of browser could end up saving on your data bills. Opera Mini, which just launched a new version with support for a host of Indian languages, has for years been crunching web pages so that they load faster on slower connections and also ends up being cheaper.

Opera Deputy CTO Bruce Lawson says the Opera Mini browser can typically compress data by up to 90 percent. This means a 1MB page is compressed to be 100kb by the time it loads on your page. So you can effectively browse ten times more pages using the browser, thanks to the compression.

“Typically a web page consists about 50-60 assets. The request is sent to our data centre in Iceland called Thor which compressed the pages and sends it down as one binary blob, or file,” he told IndianExpress.com.

Lawson says Opera just wants people to be connected fast, affordably and safely. “We so many people contending for the same bandwidth compression is absolutely the key,” he says, adding how Opera compressed over 23 petabytes of data last month.

For the record, an average web page is about 2.5MB of which 1.3MB is taken up by pictures. This is where most of the compression happens and Lawson suggests more websites should start using responsive photos which load faster.